The first day of the Advanced Lithography Symposium began, as it always does, with the plenary session. David Williamson, possible the world’s foremost catadioptric lens designer, won the 4th Zernike Prize for Microlithography. Much deserved. And after Burn Lin, Grant Willson, and Tim Brunner, it’s good to see that someone who didn’t work for IBM is deserving of this honor.

The plenary talks began with Hans Stork, CTO of Texas Instruments, describing the challenges of scaling CMOS down to the 32 nm node. Surprisingly, though, after giving a very good description of the challenges, he failed to mention the TI strategy for addressing those challenges. Of course, that strategy became well known a month ago when TI announced that it was laying off its R&D staff and relying on foundries for manufacturing below 45 nm. There were over 1000 people in the room for that plenary talk, and one very large elephant. I thought it was important to point to the elephant.

George Gomba then gave a very nice sales pitch for the IBM lithography cabal. I have to admit that I like the new buz-phrase “computational lithography.” I found it interesting that the logo for their lithography efforts was a single tear.

Mark Melliar-Smith followed up with a sales pitch for nanoimprint lithography as a viable alternative for 32 nm half-pitch CMOS manufacturing. On one of his concluding slides I counted up about 5 – 6 orders of magnitude improvement required to make imprint work at this node. That’s a lot, but I think it is still less than the relative orders of magnitude improvement required for EUV.

The sessions began after a coffee break, and immediately there were multiple talks I wanted to be at at the same time. Welcome to SPIE. And it seems like the meeting just keep going. At 9pm I caught the tail end of a panel discussion on double pattering, “Twice the gain for twice the pain?”. It reminded me of the old story of the frog in a pot.

Throw a frog in a pot of boiling water and he will feel the pain and jump out. But put him in cool water and he is happy. Now if you slowly start heating up the water, the frog doesn’t notice the rising temperature until it is too late, and he is cooked. So my question for everyone working on 65 nm, 45 nm, and 32 nm half-pitch lithography solutions: how hot is it now?